Film Retrospective
MAPPING GRAY ZONES

Harvard Film Archive

The fifties in West Germany are not a lost decade, as popular liberal mythology likes to have it—a silent one, maybe, similar to the States, but not a lost one. And, yes, the films of the period do tell this story. With all their unpredictable twists and turns of stories and fates, double and triple endings, clashes and/or layers of styles and genres, 1950s West German cinema bears witness to this surprising and often creative quest for a modern democratic state out of the rubble of a modern fascist dictatorship. (…)
Today, FRG 50s cinema remains essentially unknown abroad, and at home it’s considered a special case. Vanished from the screens big and small where it was still a formidable presence until the coming of the Berlin Republic post-‘89, badly preserved by the nation’s various archives, buried under heaps of clichés and truisms about the period long debunked by academia in fields like history or sociology, it has become more difficult than ever to discuss this era in German film history.
This program is a digest/variation of a much vaster retrospective on the subject presented at the Locarno Film Festival 2016 under the title Beloved and Rejected. Both were conceived as invitations to further exploration, as sketches of a map in dire need of textures and colors. In contrast to any earlier explorations of the period (in the late 1980s in the FRG as well as the early 2000s in the USA), attention was also paid to all aspects of production beyond narrative feature films, to give a more proper idea of the various riches to be found here.
Excerpts of the introduction by Olaf Möller, born, raised, still living in Cologne, writes about and programs films.Saturday November 3 at 7pm
Friday November 30 at 9pm Chased by the Devil (Vom Teufel gejagt)
Directed by Viktor Turžanskij. With Hans Albers, Willy Birgel, Lil Dagover
West Germany 1950, 35mm, b/w, 100 min.
Preceded byDream in Ink (Traum in Tusche)
Directed by Rolf Engler
West Germany 1952, 35mm, b/w, 9 min.